Forty tracks from Being Boiled on
In November 2012, Virgin issued All The Best: a 40-track, two-CD survey of The Human League from the early Fast Product years through the Dare breakthrough and the later Virgin singles. It is not a studio statement. It is a catalogue map, built so a new listener can walk from Being Boiled to Don’t You Want Me without losing the thread of Philip Oakey, Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley.
The spine of the set is still 1981. After the split that left Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh forming Heaven 17, Oakey rebuilt the League around Catherall and Sulley, then took the songs to Martin Rushent at Genetic Studios in Berkshire. Rushent rebuilt arrangements from the ground up on synthesizers and Linn drums. The Sound of the Crowd, Love Action (I Believe in Love) and Open Your Heart made the UK charts before Dare landed that October. Virgin put Don’t You Want Me out as the Christmas single; it went to UK No. 1 and topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 1982.
On disc one the sequencing keeps the radio hits close: Don’t You Want Me, Love Action, Mirror Man, (Keep Feeling) Fascination, Human. The mix is dry and hard on the downbeats, Oakey’s baritone answering Sulley’s verse like a soap-opera argument. Disc two pulls the earlier edge back into view: Being Boiled, Empire State Human, Seconds, plus the Giorgio Moroder collab Together in Electric Dreams and mid-80s cuts like The Lebanon and Heart Like a Wheel. You hear Sheffield electronics becoming chart machinery without erasing the first chapter.
You’ve completely ruined the song.
(Philip Oakey to Martin Rushent after hearing the finished Don’t You Want Me, recalled in Sound on Sound)
That quarrel is the compilation’s secret thesis. Oakey wanted a colder, lonelier finish; Rushent and Jo Callis pushed a brighter pop mix; Virgin’s Simon Draper sided with the hit. The single Oakey ranked as the weakest track on Dare became the song that defined the band worldwide. All The Best puts that contradiction next to the industrial early singles and the Jam & Lewis ballad Human, so the career reads as one long negotiation between experiment and chorus.
As a listening object the set is practical: remasters, deep cuts, and the hits that still open club nights. It does not invent a new Human League. It files the existing one, from Fast Product severity to Genetic gloss, in one place. For a band whose best work was always about how machines and voices argue in public, that filing is enough.
All The Best remains a Virgin-era summary rather than a myth rewrite. Cue Don’t You Want Me and you still hear the toilet-booth vocal, the Linn snap, and the duet that Oakey nearly buried at the end of side two. The compilation’s job is simpler: keep that argument audible for whoever arrives late.
